Embodied musical experience

Tiger C. Roholt explains why grooves, which are forged in music's rhythmic nuances, remain hidden to some listeners. He argues that grooves are not graspable through the intellect nor through mere listening; rather, grooves are disclosed through our bodily engagement with music. We grasp a groove bodily by moving with music's pulsations. By invoking the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of "motor intentionality," Roholt shows that the "feel" of a groove, and the understanding of it, are two sides of a coin: to "get" a groove just is to comprehend it bodily and to feel that embodied comprehension.

In this paper I address how autoethnography was utilized to research the role and value of arts practice research in Western classical music professional training and practice, by a classically trained professional violinist. As a researcher, I use the philosophy and method of Dalcroze Eurhythmics as a framework to excavate the multiple layers of my own practice and investigate whether there is wider potential resonance for other professional performers. I utilize a mixed-mode approach, combining artistic practice with a number of documenting strategies, in particular using autoethnography as a tool for documentation and reflection. I propose key findings concerning the value of arts practice, and how an autoethnographic journey facilitated the emergence of the self as artist, within the Western classical music culture. The processes of excavation, enabled by autoethnography, attempt to unearth the holistic artist within the performing musician.

I consider the metaphysics of farts. I contrast the essential-bum-origin view with a phenomenological view, and I argue in favour of the latter. Le Petomane performed at the Moulin Rouge in the 1890s to the great and good of the day, such as Sigmund Freud, the Prince of Wales, and the King of Belgium. His art was musical farting. He perfected musical farting into an art form. And there are still musical farting performances today. There is an Austrian duet, for example, who dress in formal evening wear with long coat and tails, but the trousers have a discrete hole through which the instrument can be played. But what exactly is a fart? There are two ways of thinking of farts, or two concepts of farts. A fart is either a thing or an act. We fart farts. Let us begin with farts considered as things. What are the identity conditions of fart-things? Are they proper objectsreidentifiable particulars? Suppose someone emits a series of farts in rapid succession, like a staccato trumpet call. Is that many distinct farts? But in a nearby possible world in which the emission of gas was more legato with no breaks, would there only have been one long fart, with pulsations in volume (in both senses)? Is that legato fart the same fart as the series of staccato farts? What about the origins of farts? Once one thinks of farts as objects out there in the world, it is natural to think that they have essential origins in bums. If particular farts have

Reviews the book, The Emotional Power of Music: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Musical Arousal, Expression and Social Control, edited by Tom Cochrane, Bernardino Fantini, and Klaus R. Scherer (2013). This book is an anthology that draws together an impressive range of perspectives to explore the deep connection between music and emotion. The volume includes interviews with composers and performers, historical accounts of the social and therapeutic uses of music, various philosophical approaches, as well as research and theory in psychology and neuroscience. The book is organized in three sections, entitled “Musical expressiveness,” “Emotion elicitation,” and “The powers of music.” Each section receives an introduction by one of the editors where constituent chapters are outlined and placed in context. These introductions offer useful background information for readers who may be new to this area of research. Likewise, they allow more experienced readers to better orient the research offered by each author within the field at large. The writing is generally clear and well referenced; key terms and concepts receive adequate explanation. As a result, the book should be accessible to anyone interested in the topic while remaining a valuable reference for scholars in the field of musicology and psychomusicology.

The capacity for music to function as a therapeutic force for bio-cognitive organization is considered in clinical and everyday contexts. Given the deeply embodied nature of such responses, it is argued that cognitivist approaches may be insufficient to fully explain music’s affective power. Following this, an embodied approach is considered––where the emotional-affective response to music is discussed in terms of primary bodily systems and the innate cross-modal perceptive capacities of the embodied human mind. It is suggested that such an approach may extend the largely cognitivist view taken by much of contemporary music psychology and philosophy of music by pointing the way towards a conception of musical meaning that begins with our most primordial interactions with the world.

Although there are vast amounts of literature on the effects of music, there are clear gaps on the impacts of festival attendance with regards to music festivals as a source of social well-being for attendees. Packer & Ballantyne (2011) state that although the physical and cognitive advances of engaging with music are recognised, there has been insufficient research into the psychological benefits of engaging with music at festivals. Therefore, it is imperative to expand our understanding of the positive impacts music festivals have on young festival goers. This dissertation explores the opinions of sixteen young festival attendees between the ages of 18-28 in order to analyse their view of the overall festival experience. Focus groups were selected as the most appropriate technique to assist in achieving a comprehensive understanding of the participant’s perceptions of the topic in question.

Primary research distinctly showed how music festival attendance leads to positive outcomes for attendees. Focus group participants highlighted five key areas of importance. The areas were the music experience, the festival experience, the sense of escape, the social aspects and the link between music and emotion. Although some of the negative impacts of music festivals were expressed by the participants of the focus groups, emphasis was on music festival experiences as the basis for social well-being and enlightenment. The findings demonstrated a similarity between the results of the focus group and previous literature, although there were some differences between the two. An interesting variance was recognised between what the literature believed to be of significance to festival goers and what the participants perceived as important to them.

However, future research would be of significance to explore this topic further.

Following the success of the conferences in Coventry (2013) and Vienna (2015), ICDS3 took on the role of presenting the best practice, theory, research and debate within the growing interdisciplinary field of Dalcroze studies. Being outside Europe for the first time, this conference established ICDS as a truly international event.

Over five days, delegates from more than twenty-five countries and every corner of the globe shared a wealth of papers, workshops, symposia, roundtables, posters, research training seminars, keynote addresses and performances. For the first time, the conference included keynotes focused on showcasing practice, allowing delegates to participate and highlighting the embodied, experiential nature of the knowledge that Dalcroze studies investigates.

With its long tradition of Dalcroze training, Université Laval was a fitting host and, being in the beautiful UNESCO World Heritage city of Québec, ICDS3 was a conference to remember.

The study of music cognition has been dominated by a largely disembodied conception of the mind. This so-called ‘cognitivist’ perspective treats mental activity in terms of abstract information-processing––where the world is represented in the mind via the computation of ‘sub-personal’ symbols; and where the mind-brain relationship is explained in terms of a collection of cognitive modules shaped by natural selection. Recent decades have seen an ecological-embodied paradigm emerge in cognitive science, as well as more plastic and interactive conceptions of the mind-brain and organism-environment relationships. These new perspectives offer a much broader understanding of meaning-making and the mind and are becoming increasingly influential in music cognition studies.

The orthodox approach to the mind and its origins is examined; and its influence on music cognition research is discussed. Alternative embodied, developmental, ecological and bio-cultural perspectives on cognition and the musical mind are considered. The ‘enactive’ approach to embodied cognition is then offered as a theoretical framework that better accommodates these broader and more nuanced ways of understanding musical meaning. To conclude, the relevance of the enactive approach is considered for music education, performance and practice.

The enactive approach to cognition is developed in the context of music and music education. I discuss how this embodied point of view affords a relational and bio-cultural perspective on music that decentres the Western focus on language, symbol and representation as the foundations of cognition and meaning. I then explore how this 'life-based' approach to cognition and meaning-making offers a welcome alternative to standard Western academic approaches to music education. More specifically, I consider how the enactive perspective may aid in developing deeper ecological understandings of the transformative, extended and interpenetrative nature of the embodied musical mind; and thus help (re)connect students and teachers to the lived experience of their own learning and teaching. Following this, I examine related concepts associated with Buddhist psychology in order to develop possibilities for a contemplative music pedagogy. To conclude, I consider how an enactive-contemplative perspective may help students and teachers awaken to the possibilities of music education as ontological education. That is, through a deeper understanding of ‘music as a manifestation of life’ rediscover their primordial nature as autopoietic and world-making creatures and thus engage more deeply with musicality as a means of forming richer and more compassionate relationships with their peers, their communities and the ‘natural’ and cultural worlds they inhabit.

"> Context • The past few years have presented us with a growing amount of theoretical research (yet that is often
based on neuroscientific developments) in the field of enactive music cognition. > Problem • Current cognitivist and
embodied approaches to music cognition suffer, in our opinion, from a too firm commitment to the explanatory role
of mental representations in musical experience. This particular problem can be solved by adopting an enactive approach
to music cognition. > Method • We present and compare cognitivist, embodied and enactive approaches to
music cognition and review the current research in enactive music cognition. > Results • We find that, in general, the
enactive approaches to human musicality are capable of explaining the basic relationship between a musical subject
and a musical object according to a pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic form of understanding related to bodily motor
expertise. This explanation does not rely on on sophisticated forms of representation. > Implications • Proponents of
enactive music cognition should, in our opinion, focus on providing a consistent explanation of the most basic level of
musical understanding. > Constructivist content • We hope to invite the constructivist community to engage with the
discussions on the intersection between music and enactivism. > Key words • Music, cognition, embodiment, enactivism,
musical understanding"

This article, which won the 2023 Society for Music Theory Outstanding Publication Award, explores the nature of metrical knowledge underlying Justin London’s many-meters hypothesis. It argues that meter is a form of culturally situated kinesthetic knowledge, or a knowledge of what it feels like to move to music in a particular way. This reframing of meter focuses on its technical and bodily dimensions, which links the analysis of meter with issues of social inclusion and exclusion, of learning and unlearning, and of habit and novelty. The article illustrates the implications of this approach with examples from recent progressive metal, where musicians manipulate the backbeat to present listeners with affordances for the enactment of different forms of time.

During the last ten years, somaesthetics has been increasingly applied in studies of music, sound, and the voice. In this overview, I will map out the most interesting articles and books in this field after briefly introducing somaesthetics and considering how its various dimensions could be utilized in issues related to sound and music. In addition, I will discuss the role of the body in previous academic approaches to music. In the first main section of the article, I will introduce some texts by Richard Shusterman, the developer of somaesthetics, in which he deals with music, sound, and the voice. After that, I will present the writings of other scholars who apply somaesthetics in their music-, sound-, and voice-related approaches. This article is intended to give an overview, not to comprehensively deal with the content of these texts, and to offer some entry points for readers interested in applying somaesthetics to research and/or artistic practices involving music, sound, and the voice.

The field of interactive music systems (IMSs), beginning in the 1980s, is still relatively young and fast moving. The field of music theory-analysis, during the same period (since 1980), has undergone a major transformation in terms of technological innovations, flexibility, and breadth. The two fields have not really caught up with each other. It will be interesting to see what arises as they do — especially as both fields have become more concerned with the role of the body and embodied cognition. Framed in terms of contrasting epistemological orientations, this essay considers some relevant developments in IMSs, music cognition, and music theory and analysis, leading up to the present.  The most popular approaches to music cognition and to IMS design are rationalist (Ashby 2010), exploiting the ‘correct’ embodiments of music (Godøy 2004, Leman 2007, Paine 2009) based on affordances (Gibson 1977, Kelso 1998). This essay, however, advocates a pragmatist (Ashby 2010) approach inspired by music analysis and exploiting the potential of kinesthetic learning (associative learning). Prompted by a progressive approach to music analysis, theory, perception, and cognition (Dubiel 1999, Mailman 2007), interactive music technology can also be constructive, flexible, and progressive, by exploiting kinesthetic learning from immersion in new and unusual motion-to-sound mappings derived from dynamic formal processes in analysed music. In this way, immersive interactive systems offer an opportunity systematically to learn new associations based on principles theorised in response to analysis. Experience of these systems essentially ‘rewires the brain’, thereby exemplifying what Korsyn (2004) has attributed to Lewin’s (1986, 1987) approach to music perception: the ironist approach, as formulated by Rorty (1989). Thus a pragmatist ironist experimental (PIE) approach is articulated. Rather than committing to any particular ways music is already embodied, this approach acknowledges the flexible nature of embodied musical experience. It forges and uses interactive music technologies continually to redescribe and therefore reform how music is embodied, thereby disembodying to re-embody music, expanding how music is heard, contemplated and experienced.

Does music “embody” the dancing movement? Or does (and if yes, how does) popular dance embody musical patterns and costume designs? On the one hand, dance and music curricula in universities and schools of dance in Greece consider music and dance mostly as coexisting and—in a superficial way—collaborating arts. They rarely refer to the “corporalization” of music, nor do they examine the relation between dance and other involving arts of a performance, such as painting and costume design. It should also be noticed that interdisciplinary creative collaboration between music and dance (and also other arts) was achieved in 1950s. This paper will try to explain how popular dance can reflect costume design and the patterns of music, and lead to a creative collaboration among these arts. For the performances of the Greek Chorodrama (Manou's Dancetheater Company), the composer, the painter, the writer, and the choreographer worked at the same time, interactively; Rallou Manou “translate...

This paper presents a micro-temporal analysis of a complete, 34-minute long vilambit (i.e., slow) sitar and tabla duo performance by Pt. Nikhil Banerjee and Zamir Ahmed Khan. The analysis involved extracting the onsets of approximately 3,000 musical sound events—the deliberate manual strikes on the sitar strings and tabla skins—produced on the metric level of ‘maximal pulse salience’ (i.e. half-mātrā) in the course of performance. These data were used to analyze performers’ tempo fluctuations, isochronization, mean asynchronization, and interpersonal entrainment throughout the vilambit and across various formal sub-sections. The analysis reported here is original in that it tackles an extended duration of a North Indian instrumental duo performance, with the aim of relating micro-temporal patterns to other variables such as alternating musical roles, surface rhythm, metric cycle, and formal development. Results reveal consistent patterns of micro-temporal interaction, including: (i) linear micro-fluctuations in tempo relating to the performers’ alternating roles as soloist and accompanist; (ii) cyclical micro-fluctuations in tempo according to metric framework; (iii) higher isochronization values when performers act as soloists; (iv) higher mean asynchronization values during tabla solos; (v) persistent phase relationships according to musical role; (vi) marked changes in synchronization and coupling according to surface rhythm and formal development; and (vii) cyclical patterns in levels of synchronization, phase, and coupling relating to metric framework. The study of sitar and tabla performers’ micro-temporal interactions thus exposes a new functional level in which musical roles, expression, and formal development are enacted in this genre.

A growing number of psychological and philosophical musicologists are becoming dissatisfied with the limitations of standard approaches to music cognition, which are often based on disembodied and de-contextualized appraisal processes. The activities and phenomena associated with the word ‘music’ span an incredibly wide range of human experience and as a result, many researchers are turning to embodied approaches in order to develop more nuanced ways of accounting for musical meaning and communication as it emerges at the intersection of biology, culture and lived experience. The practical implications of ‘embodied cognition’ are beginning to be developed across a range of areas, including music education. However, while the notion of ‘embodied ways of knowing’ is increasingly embraced by music and arts educators, the philosophical and scientific grounding for 'embodied music cognition' often receives less attention than it deserves. With this in mind, this paper examines embodied music cognition in the context of musical communication and meaning making; and it introduces related literature in human development, philosophy, and neuroscience. To conclude, the relevance of embodied music cognition is considered in the context of music education and practice.

Resumen El proyecto Metabody cuestiona la homogeneización inducida por las tecnologías de comunicación y propone los entornos Metatopia: instalaciones interactivas compuestas de estructuras sobre las que se proyectan luces, arquitecturas virtuales y sonido sintetizado. Los participantes se colocan dentro del dispositivo con sensores que transforman todos los elementos de manera no lineal ni cartesiana con el fin de promover el hackeo ontológico: la emergencia de formas diversas de corporalidad y cognición. Este trabajo estudia la experimentación de los sujetos con el dispositivo para conocer sus procesos de alteridad corporal y cognitiva y todos los componentes de su experiencia. Se ha realizado una observación sistemática de sus performances corporales, funciones gestuales y tipos de interacción con el entorno y, a través de entrevistas en profundidad, se abordan sus experiencias subjetivas. Los resultados se modelan a través de teorías de la cognición corporeizada enactiva; las categorías de movimiento de Laban; el habitus de Bourdieu y los principios del ontohacking que propone el proyecto: desalineamientos, metagaming, amorfogénesis y flexinámica. Los resultados muestran vivencias de entrecruzamiento de modalidades perceptuales; metaforización y dislocamiento subjetivo producido por la pérdida del sentido de control y la noción de tiempo-espacio; así como la disolución de las fronteras entre sujeto y entorno.

Abstract Metabody Project challenges standardization induced by communication technologies. Its main proposal consists in a series of environments named Metatopia: interactive installations made up of structures on which lights, virtual architectures and synthesized sound are projected. Participants situate themselves inside the device equipped with sensors that

https://www.esm.rochester.edu/integral/35-2022/hudson/
Mads Walther-Hansen's admirably short monograph on cognitive metaphors for sound quality and timbre may not be filed under music theory, but lies just outside of a disciplinary boundary that is rapidly expanding towards it. This condensed theoretical text doesn't look like music theory traditionally has; it contains no score examples, it analyzes a corpus of technical and journalistic writing about music instead of patterns of pitch and duration, and it cites very few card-carrying members of SMT. It has been published by Oxford, but not under their Studies in Music Theory series-and yet, it is an important contribution to the field that resonates with recent trends, especially in embodied cognition and topic theory. In this review, I will examine how Walther-Hansen's book is compatible with established music-theory epistemologies, and propose ways in which aspects of his model could be adapted to make an even clearer fit for music theory's norms of systematicity and rigor. Finally, I will discuss the advantages and consequences of this field including more research that departs from its traditional methodologies, which have usually focused on segmentation and classification of patterns of notes in a score. Specifically, music theory must include more research like Walther-Hansen's work on cognitive metaphors if it is to describe listeners' musical intuitions and experiences with a substantial degree of completeness or veridicality.

In this article I will introduce a concept of empathetic listening and highlight some methodological considerations of the concept. The aim of my article is to bring the empathetic point of view alongside the analytical way of listening in order to study popular music singing. Almost all music listeners are able “to put their souls” into what they are listening to, but the awareness of this emotional or affective level of listening varies. The important questions here are: how to bring the affective and bodily aspects of listening into words so that this subjective level of music perception could be shared and discussed in more details; and how the bodily based nuances of a singing voice act as a part of meaning formation in an listening event? The starting point of my approach is phenomenological. I also use methods from phonetics and vocology to bring the physiological body alongside the experiential body in this observation.

This paper articulates the design for the first stage of INTIMAL: a physical/virtual embodied interactive system for relational listening in the context of human migration, set within the artistic practice of improvisatory telematic sonic performance. Informed by the Deep Listening experiences of nine Colombian migrant women in Europe and integrating Embodied Music Cognition Methods, INTIMAL draws upon sensorial experience in dreams, virtual spaces, and physical spaces to develop a holistic understanding of the body as an interface that keeps one's memory of place. Technologies are intended to be used as mediations aiding the co-relations in listening for the sensing, processing and retrieval of an oral archive of other women's testimonies from the Colombian civil war, while improvisers' body movements, voices, and spoken words resonate with these voices. The author suggests how INTIMAL system could act as catalyst for creating new layers in the reconstruction and transformation of embodied memory, opening paths for individual and collective healing of feelings associated to the migratory experience and the armed conflict.

INTIMAL is an interactive system for relational listening, which integrates physical-virtual interfaces for people to sonically improvise between distant locations. The aim is to embrace two key aspects in the context of human migration: the sense of place and the sense of presence. This paper reflects on the use of INTIMAL in a long-distance improvisation between the cities of Oslo, Barcelona and London in May 2019. This improvisation was performed by nine Colombian migrant women, who had been involved in a research process using the Deep Listening® practice developed by Pauline Oliveros. Here we describe the performance setting and the implementation of the first two interfaces of the system: MEMENTO, an “embodied” navigator of an oral archive of Colombian women’s testimonies of conflict and migration; and RESPIRO, a sonification system that transmits and sonifies live, breathing signals between distant locations. We reflect on how the two interfaces facilitated and challenged the improvisers’ listening experiences and connections.

The “One-Person Choir” is a human–computer interface for singers that facilitates gestural control over a digital signal processing (DSP) module for harmonizing the singing voice in real time (see Figure 1). Harmonization adds extra pitch-shifted voices that are tonally related to the input voice. The interface captures global movements of the upper limbs by means of an integrated network of inertial sensors attached to the upper body of a singer. From these data, gestural cues are extracted and compared with a preconfigured gestural model that has been trained with empirical data. When the gestures of the singer match the preconfigured model, it is possible to control the harmonization of the singing input voice captured by a microphone. Thus, the interface allows a singer to naturally enhance the expressive qualities of his or her voice with the assistance of expressive gestures connected to an electronic environment. The One-Person Choir can be integrated in interactive multimedia installations that exploit the expressive power of gestures in combination with singing. As will be argued in this article, installations illustrate, and elaborate on, an ongoing shift in contemporary electronic and electroacoustic music: the move from interactive systems (or hyperinstruments) to composing interactions (Di Scipio 2003).

This paper articulates the design for the first stage of INTIMAL: a physical/virtual embodied interactive system for relational listening in the context of human migration, set within the artistic practice of improvisatory telematic sonic performance. Informed by the Deep Listening experiences of nine Colombian migrant women in Europe and integrating Embodied Music Cognition Methods, INTIMAL draws upon sensorial experience in dreams, virtual spaces, and physical spaces to develop a holistic understanding of the body as an interface that keeps one's memory of place. Technologies are intended to be used as mediations aiding the co-relations in listening for the sensing, processing and retrieval of an oral archive of other women's testimonies from the Colombian civil war, while improvisers' body movements, voices, and spoken words resonate with these voices. The author suggests how INTIMAL system could act as catalyst for creating new layers in the reconstruction and transf...

« La musique s’impose au corps » (Csepregi, 2008 : 56) en tant qu’elle se donne à vivre, à sentir et qu’elle émerge dans le temps si particulier qui la caractérise ; ce temps existentiel qui se veut, dans l’instant, temporalité essentielle de l’expérience humaine. C’est dans l’expérience que l’individu en fait, que la musique se concrétise. Dans et par l’expérience singulière qui la détermine, qu’elle prend forme d’objet sonore, phénoménal, esthétique et culturel et qu’elle se dévoile expression sonnante du monde profondément incarnée dans l’être qui la vit.

Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research
Presented April 4th, 2017

Music theory (MT) pedagogy in higher education is confronting a new wave of criticism. While some call for this core subject to be completely absorbed by related courses, others defend that it is not specialized enough. Most, however, agree that MT classrooms in the twenty-first century require pedagogical tools that address mounting concerns of diversity, creativity, and integration. Beyond conjecture, a 2016 online survey of MT students (n=286) affirms that 1) music majors view MT as a highly valuable subject, and 2) these three areas are overwhelmingly identified as MT's top weaknesses. After discussing these findings this presentation will demonstrate the profound flexibility and efficiency of Butch Morris' Conduction system as a tool for addressing these concerns, citing successful pilot workshopping in courses at University of California, San Diego. In this context Conduction becomes an enactive landscape for constructing a working knowledge of core concepts from voice-leading and harmony to modulations and form, bridging music cultures, and experimenting with more abstract systems in situ. Initial testing suggests that following Conduction, students perform better in a conventional MT class. In this demonstration attendees will experience firsthand the potential for Conduction to transform the experience of MT.

This paper contributes to the development of a multimodal, musical tool that extends the natural action range of the human body to communicate expressiveness into the virtual music domain. The core of this musical tool consists of a low cost, highly functional computational model developed upon the Max/MSP platform that (1) captures real-time movement of the human body into a 3D coordinate system on the basis of the orientation output of any type of inertial sensor system that is OSC-compatible, (2) extract low-level movement features that specify the amount of contraction/expansion as a measure of how a subject uses the surrounding space, (3) recognizes these movement features as being expressive gestures, and (4) creates a mapping trajectory between these expressive gestures and the sound synthesis process of adding harmonic related voices on an in origin monophonic voice. The concern for a user-oriented and intuitive mapping strategy was thereby of central importance. This was achieved by conducting an empirical experiment based on theoretical concepts from the embodied music cognition paradigm. Based on empirical evidence, this paper proposes a mapping trajectory that facilitates the interaction between a musician and his instrument, the artistic collaboration between (multimedia) artists and the communication of expressiveness in a social, musical context.

In this paper I address how autoethnography was utilised to research the role and value of arts practice research in Western classical music professional training and practice, by a classically trained professional violinist. As a researcher, I use the philosophy and method of Dalcroze Eurhythmics as a framework to excavate the multiple layers of my own practice and investigate whether there is wider potential resonance for other professional performers. I utilize a mixed-mode approach, combining artistic practice with a number of documenting strategies, in particular using autoethnography as a tool for documentation and reflection. I propose key findings concerning the value of arts practice, and how an autoethnographic journey facilitated the emergence of the self as artist, within the Western classical music culture. The processes of excavation, enabled by autoethnography, attempt to unearth the holistic artist within the performing musician.

https://www.themaghribpodcast.com/2021/01/jedba-jinns-and-hal-bodily-modalities.html

While music may be a universal human practice, it is not universal in its definitions, usage, or impacts. Just as notions of a “self,” “feelings,” and “the mind” vary considerably across geographic regions, notions of the senses (hearing, listening) and their bodily territories are equally variable and yet critical to what it means to be a human in the world. In North Africa, sound and music are particularly wrapped up with mental-emotional health, in what it means to be well, and they always involve ways of engaging the body. In other words, sound vibrations and music are not only social as part of a symbolic order, but they are materially agentive: they affectively impact bodily matter, oftentimes regardless of human agency. That is to say that music is often thought about medicinally, as not just temporal, aesthetic experience but as vibrating agents in ongoing health maintenance. Drawing from in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Morocco and Algeria, this talk will flesh out the inextricable relationship between mental-emotional health, sound, and consciousness through a spectrum of “psychological” states that are locally mapped as bodily modalities: jedba, ḥāl, and bori, an Algerian ritual term that references inhabitation by jnūn. These three bodily modalities constitute a wide and fluctuating spectrum of musically-cultivated trance dancing. Quite importantly, while these modalities may be the most highly cultivated in ritual contexts, such as among in Bilaliyya, Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya ṭuruq in Algeria, they are also common in public contexts as wide as festivals, wedding parties in the Mzab, and household celebrations in Constantine. This talk examines what musical practice, as embodied historical knowledge, can teach us about health and meaning-making through sensory worlds.

Depression, anxiety and loneliness due to the Covid-19 pandemic reach beyond the realm of mental-emotional health; they indicate a spiritual crisis in our time. Despite the determination of faith communities to continue nourishing their congregations through virtual worship, many congregants suffer spiritual malnutrition from lack of physical presence. Sitting on our couches and humming along to hymns does not invigorate the soul as does rising to lift our voices in a room drenched with the booming bass of the organ. Our hunger for embodied liturgy in the midst of liturgical famine calls for an emergency re-evaluation of our theology of worship.
To seek a nourishing theology of worship, we return to two hearty theological voices who were motivated by their hunger for a deeper liturgical life: Hildegard of Bingen and Martin Luther. Hildegard and Luther differ exceedingly in their circumstances and theologies, and yet this divergence serves to highlight their mutually enriching passions for the theological efficacy of music. Hildegard’s music resonated for her fellow nuns in the “vernacular” of their female voices, while Luther brought music into the vernacular of everyday German life. Neither were formally trained in composition, but they used their unique circumstances and voices to envision embodied liturgy in their contexts.
Responding to experiences of online worship gathered by the author in an informal December 2020 survey, as situated within broader cultural trends that have undermined the congregational voice, we turn to an understanding of music and theology as mutually formative. To engage the congregation’s “symphonic soul,” faith communities must move beyond livestream music and build resources to encourage embodied musical practice in the vernacular of our everyday.

This paper explores the repertoire and the role of ragas in Sikh literature and practice, not only as functional to the spiritual experience as embodied knowledge (Qureshi 2000; Flood 2005; Hess 2015), but also as sonic elements reconstituting the soundscape of the indigenous culture (Feld 2010). The singing of poetical hymns set to ragas was established in the late 15th century by Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh faith. Whereas the names of the ragas were notated in the Guru Granth Sahib as the organizing principle of the Sikh Scriptures, their practice was transmitted orally, until the impact of coloniality, nationalism and, more recently, globalization dramatically affected the indigenous aural knowledge, minimizing the importance of ragas in the performance of the hymns. The ragas that survived to this day in a few streams of the Gur-Sikh parampara, are analyzed here for their inward and outward interrelated values. On the one hand, raga-based compositions are studied in relation to the role that the musical Word has in the process of inner transmutation (Singh, 2006; Mandair 2009), from a self-willed being (manmukh) into a Guru-oriented realized self (gurmukh). From the outward perspective, with their acoustic presence, the hymns set to the traditional ragas and performed with period-instruments, represent the living memory of the pre-colonial Gur-Sikh heritage. The sonic architectures of these melodies, with their peculiar sound, are the expression of an entire cultural system of the past, in which ragas were meaningful at individual and collective levels.

For this presentation, I would like to focus on a _part_ of the model that I have been developing for some time addressing embodied as well as distributed cognitive processes involved in jazz improvisation--within an individual, and amongst the other individuals performing collectively in an ensemble. I wish to address how multiple time-scales within the individual function simultaneously during performance, sometimes at cross-purposes, sometimes in synchrony, in order to suggest how cognitive processes might extend from the individual to the collective, and what might impede that extension.

First, I would like to introduce some concepts that I have developed for this model to distinguish between cognitive processes involved in preparing for improvisation, and those that will ensure successful performance with other musicians in real time.  The first is “Projective Apprehension,” brought to bear while practicing the range of possible pathways explored to resolve a problem in improvisation, yet often remaining engaged, with mixed results, during performance.  The second, I call “Proprio-Sentience,” which describes the immediacy of contingent embodied cognitive processes while reacting to the other musicans performing.

Then, I would like to examine how current neuroscience research seems to support this distinction.  But I would also like to contextualize this inquiry in terms of how an account of multiple forms of time cognition fits into this model of jazz improvisation, which in turn is grounded in a specific paradigm of contemporary cognitive science.

I will mention a few recent empirical studies in particular that help delineate this distinction, but suggest that these studies need to be viewed initially through the paradigm of embodied cognition articulated in 1991 by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. This paradigm has become prominent since I began writing about it in the early 1990’s, and many here may be familiar with it, but I would like to highlight especially that part of their paradigm that distinguishes between top-down and bottom-up processes of cognition. 

Importantly, Varela, Thompson and Rosch suggest that this distinction does not simply reflect the historical shift from the computational model of John Von Neumann and others dating from the 1940’s, to the embodied paradigm that this 1991 manifesto delineates--the “godfather” of which these authors nod to Maurice Merleau-Ponty.  Significantly, through this distinction between top-down and bottom up processes, Varela, Thompson and Rosch then generalize about how these processes coexist and sometimes contend within the embodied mind.  In other words, they imply that the paradigms themselves reflect biases inherent in human cognition.

I will suggest that this neuro-Freudian model of cognitive emergence and control at the heart of this embodied mind paradigm becomes necessary in order to understand how cognition actually happens during jazz improvisation. “Conscious” and “unconscious” processes involved in the performance of jazz can contend in unproductive ways for what I call (self-consciously) the “screen” of the improviser’s awareness during performance, and yet are capable of achieving synchrony in ways that enhance not only the jazz improviser’s performance, but the interactivity of the jazz ensemble as well. 

Now, others have addressed both the embodied paradigm, and multiple time-scales that are involved in jazz improvisation, and I would like to mention in particular the work of Vijay Iyer and his invented concept “micro-timing” that has appeared in several articles.  But I would like to argue that how these time-scales function gain far  more explanatory power if one deliberately applies Varela, Thompson and Rosch’s account of the tensions between bottom-up emergence and top-down control central to that paradigm.  And, it is in the moment when cognitive processes during improvisation demonstrate disfunction that will demonstrate the power of the model I propose.  I am referring to the often disconcerting but sometimes rewarding experience that all jazz musicians report:  getting lost.

Many philosophers of music, especially within the analytic tradition, are essentialists with respect to musical experience. That is, they view their goal as that of isolating the essential set of features constitutive of the experience of music, qua music. Toward this end, they eliminate every element that would appear to be unnecessary for one to experience music as such. In doing so, they limit their analysis to the experience of a silent, motionless individual who listens with rapt attention to the sounds produced by either musicians a on stage, a stereo, or a portable device.  This approach is illustrated in recent work by Nick Zangwill. Drawing on essentialist assumptions, Zangwill concludes that properly musical experience is effectively disembodied and radically private.  While this seems plausible when we consider the essentialists’ paradigm case, Zangwill’s conclusion seems odd once we consider the wide variety of ways that people experience music. One’s body and social situation seem ineluctably enmeshed within the experience of, e.g., hot jazz played in a nightclub, where listeners bob their heads and dance to the music, cheer on the musicians, and socialize with their fellow concertgoers. The question this paper aims to answer is: should we consider this and similar experiences of music properly “musical”? I maintain that we should. Far from the world of pure music that Zangwill and others relegate properly musical experience,  I conclude that our musical experiences are fully enmeshed within the somatic, affective, and interpersonal dimensions of human life.

Read online: http://journal.sonicstudies.org/vol02/nr01/a03 or https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/show-exposition?exposition=261722
This essay probes the nature of listening by refusing to pin it down to a single essence. The epistemological value of metaphor is explained in terms of the cognitive metaphor and embodied mind theories of Lakoff and Johnson as well as the philosophies of Rorty and Fiumara. Then the various natures of listening are explained via seven metaphors: (1) Digestion, (2) Recording, (3) Adaptation, (4) Meditation, (5) Transport, (6) Improvisation, and (7) Computation. As a positive example, this set of metaphors promotes recognition of the inherent plurality of listening by staking out distinct facets which cannot be reduced to one another. This irreducibility is made more vivid and conceptually manageable by associating each of these facets with more concrete activities that are literally irreducible, or indeed seemingly unrelated. Moreover, some of these metaphors suggest the complementary and sometimes interdependent nature of diverse aspects of listening.

This paper contributes to the development of a multimodal, musical tool that extends the natural action range of the human body to communicate expressiveness into the virtual music domain. The core of this musical tool consists of a low cost, highly functional computational model developed upon the Max/MSP platform that (1) captures real-time movement of the human body into a 3D coordinate system on the basis of the orientation output of any type of inertial sensor system that is OSC-compatible, (2) extract low-level movement features that specify the amount of contraction/expansion as a measure of how a subject uses the surrounding space, (3) recognizes these movement features as being expressive gestures, and (4) creates a mapping trajectory between these expressive gestures and the sound synthesis process of adding harmonic related voices on an in origin monophonic voice. The concern for a user-oriented and intuitive mapping strategy was thereby of central importance. This was achieved by conducting an empirical experiment based on theoretical concepts from the embodied music cognition paradigm. Based on empirical evidence, this paper proposes a mapping trajectory that facilitates the interaction between a musician and his instrument, the artistic collaboration between (multimedia) artists and the communication of expressiveness in a social, musical
context.

This paper addresses the topic of dealing with music as a coperceptual or autonomous process. It stresses the basic distinction between presentational immediacy and symbolic representation as exemplified in listening and composing. Starting from the epistemic rule system (perception, central processing and action) which can be redefined in more behavioral terms as measurement, predictive computations and control, it argues for an adaptive and interactive approach to the delimitation of the elements on which to do the computations. An attempt is made to provide an operational description of the elements and relations which can be applied to them.